Worth Reading - Lathe

[deere2210]

http://www.lni.wa.gov/Safety/Research/FACE/Files/LatheStruckByBar.pdf

I stumbled across this tonight looking for something else. It's a sad story but worth reading.. How quickly something can happen.. Being a rookie in machining it hit home on proper fixturing and material support.

Steve

 

[justanengineer]

Holy ****! Centrifugal force at its worst. RIP.

 

[383 240z]

Totally avoidable. When he heard the noise first thug is to SHUT IT DOWN!! Follow procedure and everybody goes home in one piece. Tragic, but avoidable. Keith

 

[rodm1]

Most screw machines have a 10ft pipe extending out from the back to prevent this.

 

[Kevin54]

When my BIL was younger he was running a lathe in the production area of the shop. I'm going to say that this must have been the early 60's as I remember seeing him in bandages, but don't remember when it happened as I was quite young. But anyways, one particular job they ran, sometimes the piece would come loose in the lathe and it always kicked the piece up and back or at least it did in the past. And remind you that all of this was before safety was really a main thing of working. He heard the piece change sounds so he ducked. When it did, the piece came out and down and struck him in the head. He woke up in the hospital but didn't know why. He also couldn't walk, and he couldn't talk, and he couldn't move his right arm.

He has a plate in his head today, his right arm is totally paralyzed, and at his age of 72, he walks with a cane as the accident did nerve damage to his right side. He also has a speech impediment that gets worse as he gets older. Today he sits more than he stands because of the injury. Even a lot of the things he could do ten years ago, he can't do today as he seems to be getting worse. I would guess that in another 4 or 5 years he may be in a wheelchair.

Back at that time, you never got any settlements from a company. They treated him good as far as a person, and they had a job for him when he went back to work which he was off for maybe a year and a half, possibly two years. He had to learn to walk again, he had to learn to talk, then all of the little things like fastening your pants, buttoning your shirt, so on and so forth. They made him a supervisor of the toolroom when he went back to work. When the plant shut down in '83, they offered him another job in a different division, but by that time he was already showing he was getting worse. The lawyer he had just kept dragging things out as he decided to go on disability. In the meantime while he was off trying to get disability, he was getting $49/month to live off of. He eventually won his case and got his disability and a settlement for something like $10,000.

As far as to what the OP posted, I have witnessed that many times at work in our toolroom. I basically worked with a bunch of lazy people that wouldn't take the time to cut a piece off in the saws, so they would put a 3' piece in our Hardinge Speed Lathe and turn it on. When the machine is setting on about 2000 rpms, it only takes a second or two for the piece to bend and start whipping around. Then all of a sudden the operator finds the time to go use the saw.

There were other time that they would have to set a ring or some thin piece of material in the three jaw chuck. They would use parallel bars to shim the piece evenly in the chuck, then turn the lathe on. The lathe on a few occasions broke out the fluorescent light above the operator. That same operator happened to do it three times that I was aware of.

Then of course while they are setting up, it was more important to talk about a football game, a Nascar race, or just general ******** instead of paying attention to what they were doing, and leave the chuck handle in the chuck then turn the lathe on.

It seems like as time goes on, a lot of them get dumber instead of smarter.

 

[rslaback]

Where was that thread that said Safety Guys were just a pain in the *** again?

 

[NUTTSGT]

Wow, shows you just how fast life can change in an instant.

 

[lametec]

Notice that operator error wasn't listed as a contributing factor. I have no machinist education and only do it as a hobby, but even I know not to have 3 ft of bar hanging out the back of the lathe.

It's sad that he died, but it's mostly his own fault, especially since he had been warned about doing the same thing before.

 

[Kevin54]

Notice that operator error wasn't listed as a contributing factor. I have no machinist education and only do it as a hobby, but even I know not to have 3 ft of bar hanging out the back of the lathe.

It's sad that he died, but it's mostly his own fault, especially since he had been warned about doing the same thing before.

Doing something like that though although warned, the way that the companies of today push people to produce, it tends to make a person overlook safety.

And a lot of people just don't have any common sense. They don't think ahead as to what COULD go wrong or what WILL go wrong. I always told the guys I trained "Become one with the machine and become one with the material". Look at both with your mind what is going on with the machine, what is going on with the material when it is cutting. A couple of them thought I was full of **** until something happened. I could stand 25' away from them and could hear when something wasn't right either with the machine or there was a problem when they were cutting the material. I'd tell them to slow the spindle down, I'd tell them the part was loose in their vise. They would ask how I knew that. I'd tell them again, "become one with the machine and become one with the material". Finally one guy who really struggled came up and asked me what I meant by that.

I told him that when I was young, one of my best friends was blind. He was born premature, and the nurse turned the oxygen up too high in the incubator and basically urnt his eyes. Later on in life he his parents had them removed because they would constantly water.

I met him on the CB back in the early 70's when CB's were big. We became good friends and hung around constantly, plus I was his source of getting around. His name was Rocky. He could modify CB's, he could build linears, he could talk around the world with stuff he built. Later on in life we kind of went our separate ways. One day I was out to an automotive test track and was sitting in a break area. I saw this guy walk in and was feeling the machines, dropped some money in and bought a pop. Damned if it wasn't Rocky. All I had to say was Rocky, what are you doing here. He turned my way and said Kevin, what are YOU doing here. He knew right off who it was. He ran the stockroom at the test facility, and later on had a huge writeup in the paper where he became the transmission specialist. Rocky records music, he built a pulling tractor, and rebuilt his engines and transmissions.

So I explained this to the person I was training. I told him that a blind person can see more than he would ever see, just by becoming one with the machine and one with the material. See with your ears. A blind person can see more by listening than a seeing person can with their eyes. Finally, one day he understood it.

As far as Rocky, as far as I know, he moved out west. He was married to a woman, had two kids, then Rocky found out she was running on him. He got a divorce and he got custody of both children. How many times does that ever happen?

I'll hook up with Rocky again someday, but I have to say that he is one person that changed my outlook on a lot of things in life, and I will always be grateful for having the opportunity to call him a friend and for knowing him.

 

[driver]

A few years back we had the exact thing happen in our production shop, fortunately no-one was hurt, but the operator had to go home for some clean underwear. We have since manufactured a steady rest that bolts to the floor to accommodate the longer lengths, without further incedent.

 

[EOC_Jason]

Skimmed over the PDF... A friend of mine bought a small used CNC lathe, you could see where a bar had to of collapsed / bent while in the machine because the motor housing had a big freaking dent in it! Fortunately it's just a small motor and such, I'm sure if it was powerful enough it would of ripped some **** up!

 

[gnm109]

A friend is a professional machinist with two CNC machines. He has a Kitamura MyCenter One which is a medium-sized vertical milling center.

His other machine is a Mori Seiki Horizontal Milling Center (CNC Lathe) which replaced his former Mazak unit.

Last year he was making pipe fittings on the Mazak using long bar stock which was progressively pulled into the machine with a bar puller built into the machine. There was approximately 4 feet of 1-1/2" aluminum 6061 bar stock exposed at the back of the machine where it entered the spindle.

The bar was spinning during an operation and suddenly bent 90 degrees and began to flail around. He was standing at the control panel which was away from the rear of the machine. Fortunately, he was able to shut the machine off quickly and wasn't injured because he instantly realized what had happened.

Upon examination, it was seen that that off-balance bar had torn out most of the sheet metal on the back of the machine. It also ripped several 10 mm bolts out of the cylindrical alloy casing which covered the opening into the spindle area. I saw this because I helped him repair the damage.

The machine had been run hundreds of times in the same manner without incident so it wasn't clear why this happened. Needless to say, he started using shorter bars after that.

I own a lathe and a milling machine and I constantly think about safety. I make it a point never to have more than a foot of material sticking out of the spindle at the left side of the lathe. It's not safe.

 

[NASTYZEN]

Real sad that this kind of accident still happens now and again.
I was told some horror stories from the guys that set up the machines when I first got them.
This is my setup when I had just built it. I can safely stick a 12ft bar in the machine and can spin as fast as I need.
With a bar puller it can run for hours on it's own.
It also doubles as a metal rack.

 

[bassman]

Back in the 70s, I worked in a large machine shop which made aircraft parts. A young Russian guy probably around 30 was operating the lathe, seemed like a real nice, quite guy. I believe there were 3 large allen screws if I'm not mistaken that close the jaws that hold the work piece in place. Well, I think the piece was just too large for the lathe and didn't have enough threads engaged and one of them flew out and went right through his forehed, big enough to put you're fist threw. Life over in a second. Felt so bad. Couple days later I see the owners walking a very pretty young lady through the area. It was his wife. I felt so bad for them, never forgot that, and still think of them often. Gotta watch you're *** all the time!